Windows
by Assimbya
Summary: AU. Mina is dying, and the castle closes around her like a tomb. Sequel to my story "Compromise".


Jonathan had not lied to her. The room had tall windows, looking over a well-tended courtyard, and a good-sized fireplace, which, having deposited her bags by the door, he knelt to kindle. Mina stood at the window and tapped her fingertips against the glass. To remain standing was a great effort, with dizziness pulling at her like the tide, but she focused her energy upon it. She stole longing glances at the bed in the corner. After the long journey by train and carriage, it would be a joy to sleep in a real bed (and to sleep unbound, but she could not, she reminded herself, count on that).

The fire flared up with a sudden rush of sound. She saw, reflected in the glass of the window, the orange of the flames, but there was only an absence where Jonathan's kneeling form should have been. The image hit her uncomfortably.

"I have to go now," Jonathan said. She turned her head to look at him, but did not move. "I'll be back soon. It _will _be all right, Mina."

She could not bear to smile at him. "Thank you," she said, though it was not an answer.

He didsmile, but it seemed faint and pale, fading into the immensity of the high stone walls. She watched him leave through the arched doorway, and turned back to the window (the door was open, but if she tried to flee she would certainly fall before she made it halfway down the hall).

She heard the wind in the trees and felt proud of herself for staying upon her feet so long, and decided that she would stand at this window as long as she could manage.

In the glass, she saw the door creak open and she turned. The Count stood upon the threshold. He had changed his clothes since they arrived; she was lightly amused, for she had not thought him so vain.

"Are you thinking of throwing yourself out?" he asked, gesturing towards the window.

She did not glorify that with a response. He knew she was not an idiot. "Have you come to rape me or to kill me?"

The Count smiled. "Do you know, it has been centuries since I had intercourse with someone still human. Generally the feeding is enough to satiate me until they have become as I am. But perhaps I should make an exception."

Mina closed her fingers upon the window pane. "Or you could let me rest. I am exhausted."

"You will be exhausted for the remainder of your human life, Mina. You have lost too much blood now to be otherwise."

It was remarkable that she was still standing. But perhaps it was his blood in her, holding her up. This was real, she thought, this was the end. She had been fighting for what felt like a lifetime, and now she had reached the end of that battle. His walls encircled her, and perhaps she would never leave.

"You will end it now, then." It was not a question.

He looked at her steadily. "Do you not see yet that this is my revenge for your defiance? You will die as Lucy did, of the slow wasting illness which is my hunger. I do not know how long that will take." He left the doorway, took a step towards her. "It is among the most terrible deaths to wake from into vampirism. The bloodlust is overwhelming. As soon as you wake, you will beg for a victim." His voice never lost its pleasant tone.

She could not keep a shrill note from entering into her own. "Why are you being so cruel to me?"

"You need ask, when you yourself would have killed me? Ah, my dear Mina, this is hardly cruelty."

She knew she could not stand much longer, and she did not want to fall to the floor in front of him. "We have argued this already. If you had left my husband and my friends alone -"

"Then I would never have known the pleasure of your company. Come, let me help you into bed. Jonathan has arranged this room very nicely, has he not?"

He supported her weight and led her to the bed; she permitted him to do so. This had been required often on the journey to the castle, and she had grown accustomed to it. The mattress was soft, and she could not resist laying her head down, though she was still wearing her traveling clothes and she feared they would dirty the bedcovers.

The Count was standing, looking down upon her. She recalled with a start that the last time she had been in a bedroom with him was October second. _This is not the first time, nor the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst. _Nor the second indeed. She had lost count midway through the train journey. Two dozen, perhaps? "You _are _going to rape me, then," she said hazily.

"It would be a shame to force you first when you have no ability to resist. No, I think not. To look at you, perhaps, now that we have more space and leisure. Can you manage to undress yourself or do you need my assistance?"

She would not be touched more by him than she could avoid. Her head lurched as she sat up and unfastened her violet dress, pulled it over her head. With it off, her arms and shoulders were bare, and she shivered, despite the fire. Unfastening the corset on her own was difficult, the laces a puzzle beneath her fingers, clumsy with tiredness. She did not look at him. He had seen her body before; it was he who had fastened these laces at her back. The discarded clothes lay around her like a sloughed-off snake skin.

"Let me see," he said softly.

The castle stood wedged into the side of the mountain, and the air around it was sharp. Mina had thrown open the window, and was letting the thin sunlight play over her body when she noticed the fresh, piercing coldness, the way the wind stole in through the window. She did not, she thought, mind the cold, not when the clarity of the wind was such a welcome contrast to the still air of the train compartment. Her bare skin felt strange in the air.

She would not be human much longer. Closing her eyes in dizziness, she ran a hand across her collarbone, her breasts, her ribs. How would her skin change, in undeath? Would it still be soft, irregular, pebbled in the cold? How much of what she knew of herself would she lose?

An image of Jonathan lowering his mouth to her wrist came suddenly to Mina's mind and she snapped her eyes open.

Turning again towards the window, she realized that she did not know what time it was. She must, she thought, have slept through the morning, for the sun was already high in the sky, but she could not have even attempted to guess the hour. It was as though, in this place, all the regularity of her timetables had melted into vapor. What did she have, now, at the end of her life, when all was lost to her?

A neat, carefully arranged shelf of books, chosen by Jonathan from the Count's library. An open suitcase. Sheets, blankets, a chamberpot under the bed. Her sweat-stained traveling clothes, scattered across the floor. Her own body, weak, trembling with blood loss. Some cultures, she thought, buried with their dead all those items that had mattered to then in life. And such scant things she had now, in her vast tomb.

The castle curved around itself; from her window she could only see the high gray turrets of its opposite wing and the closed diorama of the courtyard, far beneath her.

With an effort, she pulled herself out the bed and managed, moving slowly, to reach the suitcase on the other side of the room. She knelt beside it, sinking her hands into the mess of cloth and paper. Here was the brown dress she had worn for the first half of the train journey, and the undergarments that went with it; here were the few books she had brought with her; here was her journal, written in shorthand. She swallowed hard, and hid it at the bottom of the bag. She found a clean shift, and a blue-gray morning dress. She could not manage now to dress fully without assistance, but she could wear these. It was a struggle to do up the fastenings of the dress, but she managed.

Once she had finished, she made her way back to the bed and went again to sleep.

She was awoken, hours later, by the door opening. It was Jonathan, who walked so silently now that the creak of the door was the only way she could have been alerted to his presence. "Are you cold?" he asked without preamble, "I can make up the fire for you."

She shook her head, though she was. She was enjoying the cold; it reminded her that she was still alive.

He approached, as though he meant to sit on the edge of the bed and then, a few feet from her side, he stopped. For a moment, he was silent. "I know you must be hungry," he said again, apologetically, "I don't have any food for you; I'm sorry."

She turned her face away from him and lifted her hair away from her neck. "Take what you've come for," she said.

Mina heard him sigh, though he no longer had any breath. His voice was quiet. "It does no good to be angry with me."

She did not try to keep the sharpness from her voice. "Don't talk like him." A moment passed, and she felt her soften in grief. She turned her face back towards, unable to continue looking away. "I love you, Jonathan. I don't blame you. I know that you have no choice but to do this." She opened her arms. "Please, be gentle with me."

He came, and took her in his arms and did as she asked. The bite only hurt for a moment. When it was done, she felt so dizzy that she could hardly keep her eyes open.

"It won't be as terrible as you imagine," he told her, his voice low, "we'll be together. We will have long hours to be with one another, times when we have no other obligations. You'll have me, whatever happens."

Mina thought, abruptly, as she lay in his arms, that she almost wished that he _wasn't _there for all of this, that the humiliating process of her slow death was something that only the Count need witness.

But he, she knew, had been all alone.

"You can rest now," he said, "you don't need to do anything but rest."

She rested, and did not die that night.

She was not sleeping the next time the door opened, but only lying still in the darkness, trying to remember poems. Even those she had once known by heart seemed to have gone clean out of her mind, leaving only titles and sentence fragments.

The door opened, and she did not move or scream, though the shadows crept into her chest and clung with taloned fingers to her ribcage. To be around vampirism was always disconcerting, but she had grown accustomed to the Count and Jonathan over the course of the journey, as one might grow accustomed to breathing in polluted air. This was new. She knew who this was.

"I have brought your sisters to meet you, Mina," the Count said, his voice emerging from the darkness, sinuous and harsh.

She could see them only faintly, in the thin sliver of moonlight which fell through the window. The nights here were so richly, thickly dark, so unlike London, that even the narrow sickle of the moon seemed bright. Its light caught upon pale skin, gleaming silk, golden hair, but she could not make out forms or features. Mina could not even listen for the sound of their breath, for only her own broke the silence of the room. She felt fear bloom in her collarbone.

She recognized the Count's eyes, red-tinted in the familiar dark, and traced upward to the faint line of the silver scar on his forehead. She addressed herself to those eyes. "Light a candle, please. You may be able to see in this dark, but I cannot."

"You have no need to see now. I advise you to preserve your requests for more dire need." The Count's voice was dry, and then he abruptly shifted tone and language, addressing the other women easily. Mina, who was aware of the sore edges of healing bite marks scattered across her neck and wrists, did not need to know what it was that he said.

There were more voices, women's, none of them speaking in any language she could understand, laughter. Mina curled up on her side and waited. She realized that she was crying. _Nothing I have is mine any longer, _she thought, with a clarity that startled her, _even in the blood in my veins does not belong to me._

The Count held her own, though she was too weak to struggle. She thought that she had been bitten too many times to mind the pain any longer, but it was somehow more terrible not to be able to clearly see her assailants, not to know where they were or what part of their body they were about to grasp on to. One of the women, clambering onto the bed, pulled Mina's legs apart and bit into a vein at her inside thigh. Mina could not help crying out, and heard her own voice as though from very far away.

She lost consciousness before they finished drinking.

It was dusk when she woke again, and she was so weak that she could not move. The Count was sitting at her bedside, his eyes on the gray sky outside the window. When he saw that she had woken, he leaned over and kissed her forehead. "You are very close to death," he said, "I expect that this will be the last time you see anything as a human."

She wanted to ask him for water; her mouth was very dry and her head pounded. She could practically hear her own heartbeat.

As she tried to speak, he placed a hand upon her chest. "No more," he told her, "you do not need to speak. Breathe. Savor the feeling of it."

It was difficult to see - in her vision, the window kept changing sizes, now expanding, now contracting. The only thing in the room which did not seem unstable and wavering was the Count himself.

He stood. "Don't fight me," he ordered, and she thought that he did not need to instruct her thus, that do so would, at that moment, be impossible. Easily, he gathered her in his arms and picked her up. The familiarity of the feeling made her want to laugh. Her head fell upon his shoulder.

He carried her out of the room, through hallways, down stairs, and she felt as though she was passing in and out of consciousness, the walls curling around her, encircling her body like a winding sheet. The staircases were the only things that frightened her, as it seemed as though his arms might slip and let her tumble down onto the stone. He did not do so.

They stood in a wide, low-ceilinged room which smelled of earth. Jonathan was there, she saw hazily, standing with his hands folded before him, his expression grave.

The Count bent over and laid her down. She felt her limbs and head thud against a smooth, solid surface. There were, she felt, walls around her - he had laid her down upon her back, and she found that there was not room to curl onto her side or bend her legs. She knew where she was. She wanted to cry out to Jonathan to help her, to take her out of here, but she had no voice. The Count moved again into her field of vision, this time kneeling beside her, holding the lid to the coffin. She knew what he was going to do. She could not scream.

"Goodnight, Mina," he said, and closed the lid. Everything was dark. She heard the blows of the hammer, felt them reverberating in her bones.

There was nothing more. She lay in the darkness. She breathed, shallowly. She felt fear climb out of her ribcage and devour all the life that remained in her body.

Life ended, and death was nothing but a narrow threshold.

She was awake once more, but it could not have been called a return to consciousness, for it was not a place to which she had ever been before. She was aware first of her body, of its unfamiliar stillness, like potential energy tightly coiled. Then she recalled her name.

_I am Mina, _she said in her mind, _I am Mina._

Hunger roared, like the highest flaring of a fire before it dies down. The coil snapped. She could not be still; she needed _movement. _The walls of the coffin held her too close, and she could not endure them. Without making a conscious choice to do so, she began fighting, throwing her limbs against the walls, scratching frantically at the wood till her nails cracked. A cry came from her throat. She could not break herself out - her body somehow knew that it held the potential for such strength, but there was nothing inside her to sustain it. But she could not cease fighting; she could not any longer wait in stillness.

A voice, a thin whisper stealing in and winding around her. "You are awake. Would you like me to let you out, beloved?"

She should not answer him. He knew the answer - he had sealed her in here, aware of how her hunger would tear at her upon waking. She scratched, again, at the lid of the coffin.

His laughter. "That is not an answer. Tell me, Mina."

"Yes," she said (was her voice different? She could not tell), "yes, I want you to let me out."

"Not enough. I want more from you. Beg me, Mina."

She could feel him - their minds were so close, now. He knelt beside the coffin, a hand upon its surface. He was aroused; this excited him, her imprisonment, her fighting, her humiliation.

And yet, what was her pride worth, set against her hunger, her terror, her fury? She had nothing. She was nothing. He could bury her in the earth and leave her for centuries, starving and maddened, could whisper to her each night through the soil, taking pleasure in the slow decay of her mind. Perhaps he would do so, whatever she now said. Perhaps this was the shape that his revenge took.

"Please let me out."

"I don't think you understand what begging means. Address me as your lord, as you will learn to do in the coming days. Apologize to me for your defiance, even if you do not yet feel regret for it. Abase yourself, for you belong to me, and all the life that you have now is my gift. Do as I tell you."

Mina did. Mina spoke the words that he commanded and the sharp edges of them cut bloody holes in her throat. Mina felt that he had conquered her so easily, and did not think on how long the process of her destruction had been - the white sheets in her bedroom stained with blood, the months of flight, the long hours in the close fear of the train compartment, her own slow death.

There was the sound of metal against wood as he removed the nails, as he lifted up the coffin lid. He extended a hand to her. She took it, and found that, though the hunger in belly made her want to double over in pain, she could stand without the word lurching around her.

They were not alone, in this room scattered with coffins. She saw their silent spectators - the Count's three wives, gaunt in their fine dresses, and Jonathan, whose expression was unreadable to her. They all sat at the other side of the room, gathered together, bound up in a solemnity that Mina could not quite understand.

The Count's hand was upon her cheek, bringing her gaze back to him. "And now," he said, "you pledge your allegiance to me, and I pledge my protection to you."

She was in, she realized, another world, where the allegiance of vassals to a prince was a matter of concern. The blue morning dress, dirtied now with the discarded effluvia of her mortality, seemed a ludicrous relic of a fallen empire.

He made her kneel, and gave her the words she must speak. When it was done, he gathered her up in his arms. "Welcome," he told her.

He led her to the others, who embraced her one after another. Mina waited for something from Jonathan, some word of comfort or reassurance, but her was nothing but a brief press of her hand in his.

"You are hungry," the Count said, "and while I could make you beg for this as well, I shall be kind tonight."

The child was half-dead already, and the hunger was powerful enough that Mina could manage not to look at its face before she bit. She would have nightmares, later, of the small body, the heartbeat, the screams. But at that moment, with the taste of blood filling her mouth, she felt empty. She knew that Jonathan was watching. She wondered what he must think of her, and whether, when he first had been made to do this, he had imagined her horror. She wished that he could take her in his arms and hold her and make her warm again.

She did not know when to stop drinking. The Count had to take the corpse away from her, her mouth sticky with blood. "You have done well," he told her, "and you need to clean yourself now - go with Ecaterina and Adria."

The two women he named were the fair-haired one, and the tall one who looked, with her straight dark hair, much like the Count himself. They each took one of her arms and led her out of the room.

Mina did not know what she would have expected, but the two women were kind. They spoke gently to her, and helped her with her clothes, and filled up a bathtub with warm water. They spoke to one another in what must have been Romanian, and Mina was troubled with wondering what they might be saying about her that she could not understand, but the worry did not quite touch her - she was very conscious that it did not matter, that the only things that mattered were her own body and the blood spiraling into the water and the fact that her life was ended. These women had drunk her blood, but she did not fear them any longer. There was nothing which distinguished them except time.

When she finished her bath, she put on clean clothes, and they showed her the way back down to the cellar in which she had awoken. After weeks of weakness, it was a great pleasure to walk upon her own feet without fear of dizziness.

Jonathan was the only one still sitting among the coffins. He stood when he saw her, but did not move nearer. "I love you," he said.

"Why did you join him?" she asked, "Why did you help him to find me? Why did you lead both of us here?"

She thought, as she spoke, about the bloody snow on the night that Jonathan had disappeared, Quincey's arm around her shoulder, her own voice shrilly insisting that they press on, the bitter taste of the drink Jack had given her to help her sleep.

Jonathan took a long time to respond. "There was nothing," he said, "nothing but the sky and the howl of the wolves as they ripped at my clothing. They drove me to him. And I knew he would take you, whatever I did. You don't have to be alone now, Mina. Neither of us do." He looked away from her. "I asked to go with him, when I knew he was going out to fetch you. I thought it would frighten you less, if I was there." Silence. "He's through those doors, there. He's waiting for you."

The room must have been a treasury - it gleamed with dull gold, silver, bronze, heaps of weapons, coins, and armor, shining on the floor. The Count turned to look at her as she walked in, and he smiled. "Mina, my jackal."

He held his hand out to her. She came and took it.

"You see, this is only a part of my horde. All of you are part of it - Jonathan, Adria, Ecaterina, Ileana, and you, my love. Yet you are infinitely more precious than any gold, your beauty frozen and immortalized, your minds forever a source of fascination. And I will give much to you as well, in return for the allegiance that you have so reluctantly granted. You shall see. Beautiful Mina. This is only the beginning."

He tilted her chin up and kissed her lips.

He brought her to a bedroom and stood behind her, his hands upon her shoulders.

"I am going to rape you now, Mina. You may fight; I understand that you shall want to. With time, that need shall diminish, but I will not judge or punish you for it now."

The bedroom had no windows. Mina fought.


End file.
